CricketEurope Editorial Board
\nThe news that the ICC Executive Board has decided after all to retain the format of the 2011 World Cup for the next tournament in 2015 is indeed welcome, and the decision is undoubtedly a victory for cricket over the mercenary considerations which had threatened to torpedo all the hard work of the past six years.
\nThe fact is that the chief executives\u2019 proposal to cut the 2015 World Cup from fourteen participants to ten was wrong-headed from the outset, and it was compounded by the Board\u2019s almost incomprehensible \u2013 and clearly outrageous \u2013 decision to make those ten the Full members, regardless of their current position in the ODI rankings.
\nIt is appropriate to celebrate the prospect of more upsets like Ireland\u2019s defeat of England earlier this year, and more performances like Kevin O\u2019Brien\u2019s innings in that game \u2013 not to mention the possibility that Afghanistan may be among the qualifiers for 2015.
\nYet even as it reversed the decision regarding the 2015 event, the Board adopted a series of new resolutions which go a long way towards neutralising its beneficial effects.
\n
\nFirst, and most important, it has announced that the 2019 tournament will indeed be a ten-team event, with the eight top-ranked sides and two qualifiers.<\/p>\n
So the absurd idea of narrowing participation in the \u2018Cup that Counts\u2019 has merely been postponed for four years, even if the manifestly unjust restriction to Full members appears to have been abandoned more definitively.<\/p>\n
Entry to the qualifying tournament, moreover, will apparently be based on the ICC\u2019s rankings system, rather than being settled directly on the cricket field, as it was in South Africa in 2009. The official media release on the subject is characteristically cryptic, but that seems to be the meaning of the statement that \u2018the Executive Board has confirmed that the Reliance ICC Rankings are suitable for use in determining qualification for ICC global events, subject to any regulatory amendments necessary to protect the integrity of the system.\u2019<\/p>\n
An eight-plus-two format is marginally better than the ten-Full-member one, but the arguments against reducing the World Cup from the present 14 participants are as strong as ever, and the global cricket community will need to go on articulating them until the money men who dominate the game finally get the message.<\/p>\n
In their present form, the ICC rankings table compares the performances of sides with radically different playing schedules: a country like India can play nearly 30 ODIs against fellow-Full members in a calendar year, while Ireland, the Netherlands and Kenya play only a handful against Full member opponents.<\/p>\n
It is difficult to see, therefore, how these rankings \u2018are suitable for use in determining qualification for ICC global events\u2019, even without raising the further complication that other potential qualifiers are currently in a quite different rankings table for the Associate and Affiliate members.<\/p>\n
This issue impinges directly on a much more significant one: the desperate need of the leading High Performance countries for more regular opportunities to test themselves against Full member opposition.<\/p>\n
It is simply not good enough for the members of that elite club to grudgingly concede admission for four weeks every four years, but to do nothing in the meantime to support the emerging cricket nations\u2019 attempts to become genuinely competitive.<\/p>\n
And then there is the bizarre decision to compensate for accepting a 14-team World Cup in 2015 by reducing the 2012 and 2014 World Twenty20 tournaments to twelve participants from the proposed sixteen.<\/p>\n
Whatever happened to the argument that it was in Twenty20 cricket that giving the countries from the second tier the chance to cause an upset like the Netherlands\u2019 defeat of England in 2009 made most sense?<\/p>\n
Six months ago, it seemed that the ICC was determined to drive Associates and Affiliates cricket into a T20 ghetto, and the 16-team World T20 competition was presented as good in itself as well as compensation for the constriction of the World Cup proper.<\/p>\n
And now, suddenly, that whole argument has been thrown into reverse, clearly indicating the lamentable absence of any kind of coherent ICC strategy for the development of world cricket.<\/p>\n
More extraordinarily still, the reduction in the number of qualifiers for the 2012 event to two comes after the start of a qualifying process based on the original set-up of 16 teams with six qualifiers. Will there still be a 16-team global qualifying tournament in Dubai next year, with two places in the main event on offer instead of six?<\/p>\n
What kind of governing body is it that changes the rules part-way through a competition, as part of some nefarious piece of camel-trading?<\/p>\n
Welcome as the decision regarding the 2015 tournament is, then, it is very far from being a cause for unequivocal celebration, and hard questions remain about the extent of the ICC\u2019s commitment to its Global Development and High Performance programmes.<\/p>\n
Those questions will need to be kept on the agenda in the months and years ahead, and clear answers will need to provided if the ICC is to repair the damage which has been done to its reputation by this disgracefully cynical episode.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CricketEurope Editorial Board The news that the ICC Executive Board has decided after all to retain the format of the 2011 World Cup for the next tournament in 2015 is indeed welcome, and the decision is undoubtedly a victory for cricket over the mercenary considerations which had threatened to torpedo all the hard work of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1645"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1646,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645\/revisions\/1646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}